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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Sticks and Stones

It's coming down in droves today.

Here I was sitting in Vienna thinking I was quite happy when who should pop up out of his burrow but my old mate Cardinal Pell.

And yes he’s slagging off at me again because I do not share his completely irrational belief of the invisible man who lives in the sky. According to him I am not happy. I am frightened, insecure, discontented.

He chose the time of goodwill to all men to say things about us Atheists such as we have ''nothing beyond the constructs they confect to cover the abyss''.

He also made a number of other very offensive comments along the lines that if you are not religious your life is shallow and meaningless and not worth living.

It takes a large amount of blinkered Chutzpah for someone like the Cardinal to talk about ‘constructs to confect the abyss’. He lives in the biggest fairy tale the world has ever seen. He is part of a vast and corrupt organisation that has been built on foundations of sand – with not a scintilla of evidence to support any single one of the beliefs and practices of the church. And this from Cardinal Pell who is a world class Bigot, Misogynist and Homophobe.

I find it astonishing that when any prominent Atheist – such as Richard Dawkins – makes a statement about religion – he is accused of being an ‘Aggressive Atheist’. Cardinal Pell and his brethren blithely slag off Atheists every day of the week without censure and barely a comment in passing.

Mainly of course because to Atheists it does not matter what Cardinal Pell and any other member of any other church say.

They are irrelevant. They inhabit a world of their own making where everything they do is determined by someone else – who no one has ever seen – but who is so mighty and powerful that he must be worshipped, bowed to and scraped to every day.

Atheists live in the real world. We understand that this is all there is. That does not frighten us. We appreciate the world for what it is and we appreciate the wonders of creation and nature.

I have a joy for life and the world around me. Once I was religious and was afraid of death. Now I am free of that burden and am content in the knowledge that I am a creature of creation. I have a limited time span here – as every other creature does – and then I will disappear. I don’t particularly want to go (this may change after then next US Presidential election) but I am not worried about it.

To quote the Australian Atheist Foundation

“Far from seeking to cover the abyss, the atheist looks a hostile universe full in its face without recourse to the emotional security blanket of religion and the supernatural. Unlike Pell’s Church (which has become a byword for superstition and resistance to scientific thinking) the atheist sees the world on its own terms, without the rose-tinted glasses of the promise of an afterlife”